[OAUTH-WG] Review of draft-rosenberg-oauth-aauth-00

["Lombardo, Jeff" <[e-mail]>]

[+ OAuth WG as this touches their core specs]

Thanks Jonathan and Pat for putting that forward.

Here are some comments / questions / suggestions:


  *   The use cases are very clear and are very good thought experiments to rubberstamp / challenge the models of delegated authorization we have build so far



  *   Unfortunately, the proposition seems to point towards a glorified Knowledge Based Authentication (KBA) as it will use PII validation to authenticate  as a form of "password" in a glorified Resource Owner Password Grant type flow as the request is only dealing with the Token endpoint... the problems are:
     *   Knowledge Based Authentication is highly insecure cause anyone that knowing this static information can impersonate someone else
     *   It is based on PII which are Identifiers and not Authentication factors, therefore can only allow to identify someone. On top of that, PII leak constantly and are no longer considered secure
        *   Also what would prevent the AI agent to fetch those information from the internet on behalf od the user as you noted into section 3.1. <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-rosenberg-oauth-aauth#section-3.1> Basic Token Flow<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-rosenberg-oauth-aauth#name-basic-token-flow>

By altering the required set of PII elements, designers of AI Agents can control the likelihood of hallucination (or malicious prompt injection attacks) resulting in a token issuance for the wrong user. The selection of the information becomes even more important for AI Agents. Usage of PII elements which are known publically becomes a real risk. If these are included in the training data for the LLM, it is indeed possible (and likely) that the LLM would hallucinate it. For example, if the patient in question is a famous actor, and their date of birth is public record in the IMDB, it is likely that the LLM would hallucinate the date of birth. Consequently, the Authorization Servers can be configured to require sufficient number and complexity of PII in order to provide the desired level of security.


        *   This hardly advocates for the PII to not flow through the AI cause thinking the AS will be smarter than the AI by configured to require sufficient number and complexity of PII in order to provide the desired level of security is a false expectation


     *   Resource Owner Password Grant flow is obsolete and deprecated see https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9700.html#name-resource-owner-password-cre



  *   Without consideration about the above points we are exchanging an AI Agent risk by a very secure AI Agent that could on very misleading / spoofable / malicious crafted information. I don't think this better.



  *   Have you evaluated Client Initiated Backchannel Authorization grant type flow [  https://openid.net/specs/openid-client-initiated-backchannel-authentication-core-1_0.html ] before designing this new specification?
     *   This would perfectly fit into the following specification statement in section 3.2. <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-rosenberg-oauth-aauth#section-3.2> Human-In-The-Loop<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-rosenberg-oauth-aauth#name-human-in-the-loop>

Initiate the consent review flow with the user. This spec does not specify how this occurs, it could be through an app, a chat client, or some other mechanism.

My 0.02 Canadian Dollars

Jeff

Jean-François "Jeff" Lombardo | Amazon Web Services

Architecte Principal de Solutions, Spécialiste de Sécurité
Principal Solution Architect, Security Specialist
Montréal, Canada
( [phone]

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